Introduction

More Alaska voters than ever are voting by mail or in early voting this year. This page tracks the numbers as reported by the state.

The data come from the Alaska Division of Elections website It’s a 10-page pdf, so I ran a script using tabula-py to extract the data. Additional summary information is available here.I have republished the data here, where you can download the reports from each day. I had a google sheet that was updating automatically, but that kept breaking. Other caveats: this involves getting reports from all across the state, so there are probably reporting delays.

If you see any errors, contact Ben Matheson. Disclaimer - this may not be fully accurate or up to date. It also may break at any time. This is not official or affiliated with anything…enjoy!

Statewide Early Vote + Mail Ballots Sent, Received, and Rejected

These are the raw numbers for ballots sent to mail voters, ballots receieved, and early votes that were accepted.

Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Received Percent Received Mail Ballots Rejected
117,167 49,713 42.43% 174

Note: these numbers should match what the state has published here.

Overall Early and Mail Vote Compared to 2016

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters and Received by State

Vote By Mail per Alaska House District

Early Voting Totals Per House District.

Early voting started Monday, October 19th. Here are the raw totals of votes in each Alaska House District.

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters, Received by State, and Rejected

District Number District Mail Ballots Received Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Rejected Early Vote in Person
28 South Anchorage 2334 6087 5 496
14 Eagle River/Chugach State Park 2141 4328 10 103
33 Downtown Juneau/Douglas/Haines/ Skagway 1932 4993 9 697
27 Anchorage - Basher 1809 4022 2 320
31 Homer/South Kenai 1782 4130 10 7
24 Anchorage - Oceanview 1769 4511 4 408
21 West Anchorage 1765 4279 3 448
20 Anchorage - Downtown 1757 3684 3 521
22 Anchorage - Sand Lake 1696 3966 1 280
26 Anchorage - Huffman 1627 4228 3 346
04 Western Fairbanks 1616 3458 3 502
18 Anchorage - Spenard 1566 3629 12 397
16 Anchorage - College Gate 1565 3327 6 265
25 Anchorage - Abbott 1557 3746 4 273
34 Mendenhall Valley 1531 4003 7 895
35 Sitka/Petersburg 1491 3247 9 11
17 Anchorage - University 1293 3068 1 299
29 North Kenai 1248 3000 3 13
23 Anchorage - Taku 1196 2948 7 286
06 Eielson/Denali/Upper Yukon/Border Region 1187 2393 1 98
13 Fort Richardson/North Eagle River 1183 2580 3 77
11 Greater Palmer 1173 2628 8 786
05 Chena Ridge/Airport 1158 2686 5 378
12 Chugiak/Gateway 1149 2963 3 449
10 Rural Mat-Su 1136 2730 1 420
09 Richardson Hwy/East Mat-Su 1101 2528 4 345
30 Kenai/Soldotna 1079 2733 9 2
36 Ketchikan/Wrangell/Metlakatla/Hydaburg 1012 2167 5 3
01 Downtown Fairbanks 965 2097 2 256
19 Anchorage - Mountainview 927 2119 3 150
15 Elmendorf 906 2155 7 123
08 Big Lake/Point Mackenzie 892 2186 5 499
32 Kodiak/Cordova/Seldovia 875 2324 3 6
07 Greater Wasilla 846 2214 4 634
03 North Pole/Badger 715 1663 1 186
02 Fairbanks/Wainwright 666 1475 1 157
37 Bristol Bay/Aleutians/Upper Kuskokwim 433 1140 4 7
38 Lower Kuskokwim 246 635 0 5
39 Bering Straits/Yukon Delta 197 516 2 115
40 Arctic 156 528 1 4
99 NA 36 53 0 0

Mail Voting Relative to Voter Registration and Voter Turnout per House District

For each Alaska House district, I have the number of registered voters (as of October 3, this report). You can see which districts are seeing more take-up of mail voting relative to their voter base. Additional this compares the 2020 completed mail ballots to the full 2016 election turnout.

This is not really finished yet. Also I just made up the regional labels.

Partisan Explanation on Vote by Mail

This looks at the relationship between relative vote-by-mail activity and voting results from the 2016 presidential election. The y axis is the percentage of mail votes returned relative to the total 2016 turnout. The x axis and color is the margin by which Donald Trump won or lost the district in 2016. The basic trend you see is that the redder the disrict, the less vote-by-mail there is, so far. The key exception is western Alaska (in the lower left), which voted for Clinton but is not seeing much vote-by-mail participation yet.

Voting Method Breakdown by House District

Mail and Online Rejections Per House District

About

The Alaska Division of Elections data is originally is published in a 10-page PDF that I parsed to extract the data. This uses a combination of R and Python. The Python uses Tabula to pull out the data. After that, an R script cleans out extra spaces, gaps, and labels the rows by house district and adds descriptions. I wanted to do everything in R, but I couldn’t get rJava loaded for the Tabulizer, so the tabula-py library ended up being more expedient.

This page is an RMarkdown document that calculates some summary stats, like percent rejected and then displays the data in several ggplot2 plots. The PDF parsing in particular may be brittle and this could definitely break at anytime.